The Stations of the Cross is one of the solemn ceremonies of the Christian calendar, when the Pope marks Christ’s Crucifixion with meditations on the main incidents on the way to Calvary and beyond. The ceremony is as moving as it is emblematic of Christ’s passion and death. This year, though, Benedict XVI has made some changes. The most important is the dropping of any mention of Veronica, the woman Christ was said to have encountered along the Via Dolorosa and who wiped the sweat off His face with a veil that was then marked with His likeness. The reason is that this incident is not mentioned in any of the four Gospels and has its origins in pious legend. The Pope believes Good Friday should focus Christian attention more on the figure of Christ, His suffering and His sacrifice.

The Pope’s decision may be based on the need to cleanse Christianity of accretions from the ages that tend to distort and, at times, trivialise the central message of sin and redemption. The Pope also had another pressing reason for making a change: the growing temptation of the secular world, and even of some Christians, to invoke the Apocrypha and other noncanonical sources in an attempt to delve further into the historical figure of Jesus and to explain mysteries that surround His life. Such attempts may result in best-sellers and potboilers that rely on enduring fascination with the central belief of Western culture and civilisation. But the manufacturing of fiction can undermine the enduring importance of myth and mystery. The early Christians also recognised that legend and tendentious interpretation could blur the Christian message. They insisted on paring back its scriptures to the Gospels.

Our scientific age does not happily accommodate mystery. There is the overwhelming conviction that the physical world is explainable, its phenomena subject to rational analysis. So widespread is this principle of the Enlightenment that many assume it can and should apply to the metaphysical world. Faith, they argue, should also be rational, values and belief explicable. What remains a mystery is dismissed as myth, and atheists argue aggressively that religious myths are antithetical to humane life. By their harsh definition, all beliefs and faith itself are irrational.

The very opposite is true. Mystery is central to man’s spiritual existence. Without it, there is no awe, no reverence, no transcendental meaning. Man is left only with scientific materialism, extolled by communists (and crass capitalists) but repeatedly proven transient and shallow. Christians — indeed, all religions — seek a spiritual solace in the symbolic. And this is what Good Friday signifies: the selflessness that accepts the sins of others, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for faith, the triumph, in the end, of spiritual mystery over the banality and finality of death.

Few of the events of Holy Week can be explained precisely and a love of the literal can become a mundane, meaningless legalism. Those who would explain and relativise the life and death of Christ are those who deny any metaphysical dimension to man’s existence. And the more that materialism dismisses anything that cannot be measured or observed, the more it overlooks the truth of spiritual values, the enduring power of a mystery that cannot be compartmentalised. Francis Thompson, the spiritually tortured Victorian Catholic poet, saw this in The Kingdom of God: “O world invisible, we view thee,/ O world intangible, we touch thee,/ O world unknowable, we know thee,/ Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!”.